A blog devoted to astronomy / astrophysics and space missions

A few hours ago the Progress M-28M spacecraft blasted off on a Soyuz U rocket from the Baikonur base in Kazakhstan in a resupply mission to the International Space Station also referred to as Progress 60. Less than ten minutes after the launch, the cargo spaceship regularly separated from the rocket’s upper stage, entered a preliminary orbit and deployed its solar panels and navigation antennas. After recent failures in the launches of cargo spaceships, one hopes that this mission may once again be the routine we had become used to.

An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on a series of 18 pits on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. They are nearly circular and some of them are a source of activity, emitting jets of gas and dust. They were discovered a long time ago but an analysis of the images collected by ESA’s space probe Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera allowed to establish that probably they were formed following a collapse of the surface.

Today marks the first Asteroid Day, a day dedicated to raising public awareness about the potential danger posed by asteroids and any space object whose trajectory passes through the Earth’s orbit. The date was chosen because it’s the anniversary of the Tunguska event, the destruction of a large area of ​​Siberia that took place on June 30, 1908 due to the impact of a meteorite or a piece of comet.

A flittle while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft blasted off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in its CRS-7 (Cargo Resupply Service 7) mission, also referred to as SPX-7. It was supposed to be the seventh mission that sent the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station with various a cargo. Unfortunately a couple of minutes after launch something went wrong, causing the destruction of the rocket and the Dragon.

The OSIRIS (Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) camera on ESA’s space probe Rosetta allowed to identify 120 icy areas on the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. A study of the presence of ice has just been published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics”. That presence was well known but Rosetta’s observations allowed to understand the phases of transformation into gas, how much of it forms the comet’s coma and tail and what falls back to the surface.